Marking specific portions of an image as selected is an indispensable task in digital image editing. Doing so serves as a starting point for many image editing operations, such as background replacement, color and tone manipulation, copying and pasting, and so on. Interactive selection techniques allow a user to provide a selection input or inputs relative to an image to select a portion of the image. For example, a user may make a single tap over a portion of an image displayed that is to be selected. In another example, a user may instead make two taps—one over a portion of an image that is to be selected and another over a different portion of the image that is not to be selected—to select an object from the image. In yet another example, a user may make a series of strokes on a touch-enabled display with a finger over portions of an image that are to be selected. A digital computer system can use these different types of user selection inputs, along with information about the image, to determine a selected portion of the image.
Many conventional techniques for selecting image objects from images based on user input typically determine which portions are selected using solely color information of the image. Developments in imaging equipment now enable information to be collected about a scene when capturing an image beyond mere color information. For example, imaging equipment developments have enabled depth information, which indicates distances of objects from an image capturing device, to be collected about a scene. However, conventional techniques use this additional information in limited ways to select objects from images according to user inputs. As a result, conventional techniques fail to fully leverage this additional information to improve user-aided object selection.